Homeless for Three Hours

On March 8, I performed a civic duty. Sort of. From midnight until 3:15 a.m., I sat on a street deep in the heart of Queens, in Astoria, with a friend. Our instructions were to stay on that street for the entire time, unless our lives were threatened; in that case, we were allowed to go to the nearest subway station (located, to our relief, on that street). Given those parameters, we were told to wait until someone found us, after which we could go home and receive $100 for our services.

This strange assignment came courtesy of The Center For The Study of Issues in Public Mental Health, in conjunction with New York City’s Department of Homeless Services. Every year, the city counts the number of homeless people in New York on one winter night. As part of that effort, the Center formed a control group, people like my friend and me, who stay outside for several hours throughout the city and wait to be counted. Presumably, the number of control group members counted is proportional to the number of real homeless people counted.

Despite what I originally thought, the project didn’t have much value as a sociology experiment. We did not have to act homeless in any way. We didn’t have to dress in tattered clothes, and we didn’t have to beg. We sat on newspapers, read, and talked to each other.

But the night was a fascinating education in all things New York. A van gave us a thrilling whirlwind tour of Queens, a borough I’d only visited twice before (both times for tennis’s U.S. Open). We took our first trip aboard the F train, which, we surmised, stops every couple of days. We observed that Astoria was mercifully well-lit and had a number of restaurants open into the early hours of the morning.

We also came to view the study itself with skepticism. As its entire control group, Queens had seven people, which actually meant three groups (each participant was assigned a partner to stay with for the night). Everybody, even a Columbia student who has never taken a statistics course or been anywhere in Queens besides the National Tennis Center, knows that the borough is awfully big. Big enough that a control group of three is statistically worthless.

So whatever the results are for Queens, they are not too valuable. Manhattan had many more people in its control group, though their turnout was not as high as hoped for, either. The report on how many people live on the streets has not yet been released.

The number of people living in homeless shelters - most without a house stay in shelters, not on the street - has decreased since last year. The Department of Homeless Services reports that the number of children in shelters has decreased by 9 percent since last year and the number of families fell by 5 percent. Still, the Department estimates, about 35,000 New Yorkers do not have homes.

The “Shadow Count” is the nickname for the control group of which I was a member. The name more accurately describes the actual count of homeless people. In their physical appearance and in their standing in this city, those without a place to live are New York’s shadows.

For the most part, New Yorkers succeed in ignoring the homeless. The idea that people live on the streets deeply affected me when I first arrived here from upstate New York, where the homeless do not sleep in upscale neighborhoods. (I’m not quite sure where they go.) During elementary school, I came with my father to a Yankees game. It was the first time I had ever set foot in New York City. Much about the city disturbed me, but nothing as much as the ragged man sleeping in a parking garage. The image stuck with me longer than my memory of the game itself.

That guilt remained when I arrived at Columbia. I gave money (more precisely, I gave pocket change) and had a few discussions with my freshman roommate. But daily life quickly pushed those feelings below the surface, as it does for most people. Only rarely now do I give money, even quarters.

What more can be said? Writing about homelessness courts two clichés: a confession of liberal guilt and the naive pleas of a do-gooder. Neither is effective.

The Shadow Count was originally scheduled for March 1. It was postponed because that night had one of the worst snowstorms of the year. Organizers feared the snow would keep their workers away, and they were probably right. How many of us would have braved that weather?

The event was rescheduled for March 8, one of the warmest nights this winter. For one hundred dollars, my friend and I comfortably sat outside and chatted for three hours, facilitating a flawed project: a city’s numbering of its displaced.